Streaming video media is an ever-increasing driving force in current entertainment media distribution and trends. Streaming Video over Internet Protocol (VIP) creates further quality assurance and quality control challenges for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in order to satisfy service level agreements. However, in order to ensure service level agreements are met, ISP carriers need to check media transmissions for errors and ensure accurately receiving transmissions.
In the video domain having dedicated video links in a network path for distant devices, there are no ways to loop the transmission back through the network path to the source, thereby providing confidence of the health of the network and that the signal has arrived at the intended destination. Subscribing to the same multicast or requesting delivery of a new unicast only verifies that the source is correct, but does not verify the path to the original desired destination is valid. Other techniques are known, for example port forwarding, however, port forwarding merely provides for video traffic to join the original multi/unicast. Address replication is yet another technique used to provide redundancy in switches, which replicates the traffic across multiple ports and/or switch frames. However, address replication is merely a replication of the original source traffic, and fails to instill full confidence in proper reception of the transmission.